Where Have All The Christians Gone Part 3: Let’s Not Abandon Our Cities

(This is Part 3 of a 3 part series. To read the first two parts click here. Part 1 and Part 2.)

As I finish up with my first real series of blog posts this morning, I would like to say that I am the chief among us who do not live out the very vision I see for the church. I am frightened and intimidated both by a past that I struggle to be set free from as well as a future where I do not see the next steps. I know that ultimately I am to trust God in all that He has done and will do but that doesn’t mean I still don’t battle my fleshly thoughts about my own inadequacies but I wish to show that in spite of all this I still want to spur myself and others to do amazing things in the power of Christ. So with that said…

Both in the history of the Christian flight from the urban culture and with my own adventures into that culture I wish to end (for now) with a challenge. We are called as believers to look to and live like our savior. In order to do this we must first know what he lived like. What was Jesus’ ministry on earth like? Without such information how could we ever expect to know who to do ministry?

When most of us read and think about Jesus’ ministry we mainly think in terms of rural settings. We imagine the women at the well or His forty days in the wilderness. We think of going to the Jordan river or the small towns. What we don’t realize is that a large portion of Jesus’ ministry was spent going to the cities. He went up to Jerusalem numerous times and traveled and taught in cities. Why did he go into cities? He went because this was were the people were. In the Roman empire and ancient Israel if you wanted to be able to have the most people hear your message you went into the city. All of the trade and commerce happened within it’s walls. Jesus was sent to proclaim His gospel to all people, starting with Israel. He came to die on a cross so that he might save the very cities that crucified Him.

If Jesus’ ministry isn’t enough to show the importance of not abandoning our cities, the rest of the new testament surely is. All of Paul’s missionary journeys focused on preaching in the cities. He had a correct understanding of what the best way to share the gospel was with everyone. It was to go into the places that no one else wanted to visit. He went to the broken just like his Lord and Savior did. It is not the healthy that needed Jesus but the sick and where better to find them then in a cities filled with temples and cults. Where better to be a light for Christ than in the city?

So If both Jesus and the rest of His apostles understood the importance of the city, why do we so readily abandon them? What holds us back for going boldly into our cities and proclaiming the Gospel of Christ to those who are tired, broken, and hungry? Why not head into our urban centers and show the hope that is in us? This is my vision and challenge to both myself and others: that we would boldly take the gospel into the darkest, dirtiest places in our cities and spread the hope and joy that exists in Christ. That instead of hoarding the joy of the gospel to our suburban lifestyle we would spread the wealth of the gospel to those who have nothing. Let us take back our cities for the glory of God! Let us start ministries and food banks. Why not start a store and employ people who are unemployable? Give a sandwich or a dollar to someone in need, what does it matter what they do with that money if we truly believe that God is in control? Why not go into our public school, broken as they are and teach?

That’s my desire. I hope, pray, and am working on one day becoming a teacher in an inner city school district so that I might be a light where there is no light. I might be able to inspire and share the gospel with students who have no hope.

This is my vision for us as believers. Let us not turn away from our cities but instead toward them. Why not pick up the mantle that we dropped so long ago? Let us brothers and sisters in Christ be the ones that clothe the naked, feed the hungry, heal the sick so that we can share the true cure for our sicknesses and sins. Let’s show the world and our cities that we aren’t just a people of words but that Our Savior truly has transformed us into people who act.

So in our cities, towns and lives…

Let Us Be Genuine.

 

Where Have All The Christians Gone Part 2: An Adventure

(This is Part 2 of an ongoing series. For Part 1 please read Where Have All The Christians Gone Part 1: Urban Flight)

As I was preparing to write the second part of my series on how believers should interact with the inner city I came to the conclusion that it will probably be at least a three-part series (possibly even an ongoing topic of discussion with me since there are so many areas that could fall under this section.)

Now onto my post…

I attended a small christian liberal arts college about 30 miles north of Los Angeles. Every year during the month of October the college gives a week off to its students in hope that they would sign up to go on an outreach team to local area churches. Most of these teams would be sent within 60 miles of the college to suburbs that than would have the team helping out in different ministries around the local church.

This act of outreach with the churches has the ability to be a major blessing. My own local church down has benefited by having such a team come to help do projects around the church that would otherwise not have been done in a timely manner. There is one team however that doesn’t just go to a local church but instead heads down to the college’s extension campus in the Pico Union neighborhood of inner city Los Angeles. It is at this extension campus that the college’s passion for all to see the glory of God can be truly seen. This is the group I went with my freshman year of college.

For most of the students who sign on to the trip for Pico Union they have heard the rumors and stories of how you spend the week doing what we would term to be a “homeless” simulation. What this meant was that when we arrived all of your things were confiscated and we were divided into makeshift family groups. I ended up in a family of three with two other students. Our food was taken from us and we were given only a couple of dollars to eat on for the week, being told that if we wanted anything else we would have to find a way to get it. (They wouldn’t have let us starved if it really came to it.) Then we were sent out into the night to sleep on the street, we had the luxury of having a locked parking area to sleep in that was attached to the church with the extension campus.

Before I go any further I figure I should give a little background on the Pico Union area. At one point before world war II it was predominately white but as I chronicled yesterday after the war and with a large influx of immigrants it has slowly turned into a predominately first generation hispanic neighborhood. It is estimated that over 50% of the neighborhood is undocumented. It is also one of the poorest areas of Los Angeles and has been the birth place of such gangs as the 18th Street and the Mara Salvatrucha gangs. Both maintain a strong presence in the area. To top all of this off that area is only a couple of miles away from skid row, an area of about 8 square blocks of downtown LA that houses most of the homeless population.

My week spent amongst the homeless on the streets of Pico Union was a very eye-opening experience. It was here that my passion for the inner city had begun to develop. How as Christians could we have made such an impact into our suburban neighborhoods but had left behind such neighborhoods as these. We have been called to feed the hungry and clothe the naked but left all of that for the comforts of the American Dream. Instead of giving sacrificially we have selfishly taken. This was more apparent to me down there on the streets when we went down to skid row during the days. My “family” had met another makeshift “family” (a real one not just students from my school).

This family that we had met was so concerned with our well-being that they gave us most anything we wanted. Extra food, ours. Water, ours. Money, ours. They warned us about what streets to avoid and when to get back to Pico Union. They advised against using any safe sleep areas from the missions for they tended to be worse off than the streets. (We could let them know that we were only doing a homeless simulation.) Their hope was that they might get into one of the “apartments” that was opening up in a couple of weeks. An apartment with one room and a shared bathroom that cost about 200 a week. No kitchen. Just a small 8 X 10 room.

This gave me a ton to think about. How could the bride of Christ see all of this suffering and seemingly turn its back to it. Doesn’t our great savior show what will happen for such intolerance in Matthew 25:31-46. Do we really want to hear those frightening words:

“Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire that has been prepared for the devil and his angels! For I was hungry and you gave me both to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink… I tell you the truth, just as you did not do it for one of the least of these, you did not do it for me.”

My soul and heart were telling me and do tell me now a resounding no. Another way to pose it is, if my wife were on the street homeless, starving, thirsty, and in need of medical help would I just let her lay there or instead wouldn’t I do all within my power to help her? Wouldn’t I give my life to feed her? Bring her a drink? Why then don’t we do when we see others starving, dying in a gutter?

My first major lesson in inner city ministry was to care for those who live there like they were the lover of my soul. My challenge to us all is to seek even now to do this for it is in such ministries that we get the great chance to share our savior and the hope He gives.

So for now I will be done. I will let you move onto your day with this question: Do we really see our Lord Jesus Christ every time we pass a homeless person starving or in need of shelter? Or instead do we just pass them with a fleeting glance and hope they didn’t see us? Until next time…

Let Us Be Genuine

 

Where Have All The Christians Gone Part 1: Urban Flight

Photo courtesy of Cole Jeffery. All right belong to him.

What if we found out that as believers in Christ we didn’t do all that we could to share Him? That instead we constantly bought into the America Dream? What if our hopes and desires to prosper left us blind to those things that we should really be caring about? A house with our two car garage in a good neighborhood leading to an unloving nation full of disingenuous christians?

What am I talking about? Why have I started with what seems to be an attack on the middle class christian? Our cities, that’s why. The urban centers where our churches were born out of. Now I had a hard time starting this post this morning. It’s not that I didn’t have a passion for my topic or that I don’t have a ton of other topics that I want to write about. No, instead my passion for this topic is so personal that I didn’t know how I could possible communicate it but I will try to do so here.

Long ago, at least long ago for most of us, we as a culture lived in urban centers. The idea of suburbia didn’t exist. You lived in an apartment or house that was located in a major city or you lived on a farm. For my purpose this morning I will assume that most people who read this would have lived in the city. Your house was moderate in size and you worked a decent job. There was no notion of an attached garage. You had a garage behind your house that you would walk to every morning to start your car, if you were lucky enough to have one. All this was great because you would truly know your neighbors. You spent time every summer evening sitting on you steps outside you front door talking to neighbors. It is here that you would really begin to show others the love of Christ. Moving into relationships with your unbelieving neighbors that seems almost exclusive to our Churches today.

But something happened, in the early parts of the 20th century America saw a large influx of immigrants unlike any other time before. As those immigrants moved into the country the most likely place to go would be either to families in cities already living here or to neighborhoods in the city that had other people from their homelands. For those of us whose families already lived in cities it became increasingly uncomfortable. This is somewhat understandable. Different has the ability to be scary to most people. But for believers it should have led to an opening of arms and homes for our new neighbors. Instead a new type of neighborhood was developed, the suburban community. Small cities and towns located around but not entirely in our urban center. The America Dream went from living in a land full of freedoms and liberties given to all and became a house with a two car garage and two and a half kids. As Christians we left the city for the country. We drove to our churches instead of walking to them.

This still would have worked as an appropriate outreach for our churches were still in the city. We still provided great services to the poor and the hungry. That is until that fateful day in October of 1929. The stock market crashed and lead to the worst depression this country has ever seen. Everyone was harmed by it. Christians and non christians alike had no food or money. Work was nowhere to be found. Our churches had the location but not the resources to help others. In its desperation to try to stop the downward spiral our government began to pick up the mantle that churches could not longer carry. The hungry and poor no longer graced the steps of a church but instead that of a bureaucratic office.

Something happened than that we did not intend. The Christian community left the cities. Not for good but for a while. Only in the past few decades have we begun to return to them. During the prosperous years after the depression and war we lived a happy little american dream without really paying attention to feeding and clothing the poor. This isn’t to say that we didn’t make some efforts or that there wasn’t always a group of people who stayed but overall America became a Christian nation in name and we left our cities to the government to care for.

Now as we are in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the great depression we see something happening again. Instead of moving away from cities we have begun to see an influx of young christians moving toward cities. Tomorrow I will talk more about this topic. I will expand upon a vision I have had for sometime and how I hope to help use my passion for the glory of Christ in our urban centers.

So readers, I realize that this post seems unfinished for it is but if you stop by tomorrow you will see my vision. So brothers and sisters…

Let Us Be Genuine.